Chicago Tribune's Scores

For 7,613 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 62% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 36% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 1.4 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 66
Highest review score: 100 Autumn Tale
Lowest review score: 0 Car 54, Where Are You?
Score distribution:
7613 movie reviews
  1. It's more than a first-rate film showing up and doing its job. It's cathartic, and moving, without any of the usual obvious contrivances or manipulations.
  2. Some of this is slick and enjoyable in what I'd characterize as the wrong way, the painlessly bloody, box-office-friendly way.
  3. The issues at play in Mustang are gravely serious but the tone and rhythm is brisk, headlong and intelligently lively, like the women at the center.
  4. For the record, Gus Van Sant recently made "The Sea of Trees," set in the same infamous suicide forest, starring Matthew McConaughey and Ken Watanabe. In its contrived sentimentality that film is twice as frightening as this one.
  5. It's a beauty, all right. It's more a style show than a deep philosophical treatise, but with surfaces this sleek and faces this interesting, I'll take style over substance any day.
  6. It's Chekhovian screwball, a perfect little tale of love (or thereabouts) in bloom among the weeds of an ordinary life. It feels like a classic already.
  7. This excellent film works the way Blanchett's characterization of Carol works: It's meticulous about appearances, while fully aware that appearances can deceive.
  8. The Hateful Eight is an ultrawide bore.
  9. Compared to so many varied and skillful female-driven hits such as "Bridesmaids," or this summer's "Trainwreck" and "Spy," Sisters isn't worth talking about.
  10. It is good. Not great. But far better than "not bad." Solidly, confidently good.
  11. Strange as it seems, if you choose to set aside the female roles in The Ridiculous 6 reducing women to cleavage or to mute humiliation, the movie is a long, long way from the worst Sandler movie ever made.
  12. Wiseman's film allows everyone their say, so that In Jackson Heights becomes one of the truest images of gentrification and its costs on film.
  13. Joy
    Lawrence is very good in the role, as far as the role goes. But the script never jells; the comedy feels forced and mechanically boisterous, particularly in the crucial early passages.
  14. I wish Howard's film had more of a distinct personality and drive behind it; Howard's made some supremely enjoyable films, in various keys, but this waterlogged, effects-crazed picture isn't one of them.
  15. Partly, I think, the problem lies in Kurzel and his key performers being so determined to make the language conversational and naturalistic, they forgot to make the individual scenes move.
  16. If a film can essentially succeed while also remaining essentially frustrating, here's a prime example.
  17. That first hour is big, and imposing. The rest grows smaller, with the script's self-conscious deeper meanings either layered on top, like pelts, or — more successfully — left to Luzbeki's meticulous images of a sun-dappled 19th century Eden now home to one too many Wal-Mart stores.
  18. If Chi-Raq disarms even a small percentage of those who see it, and provokes any reflection about a gun culture, the uses of satire and the plight of a sadly emblematic city, it was worth the effort. However mixed-up the results.
  19. Still, it's pretty rich watching Rogen puke all over a Christmas Eve Mass in front of his in-laws.
  20. Writer-director Billy Ray's Americanized redux isn't a disaster, exactly; it keeps its head down and does its job. But nothing quite gels, or clicks, or makes itself at home in its adopted setting.
  21. Half the film, written by Coogler and Aaron Covington, revels in cliches, skillfully. The other half sidesteps them and concentrates on scenes and relationships that breathe easily and draw us in the hard way: not by narrative fiat or bald calculation, but through well-written and shrewdly acted encounters.
  22. The Hunger Games has completed its tasks well and met fan expectations.
  23. It sounds sentimental, icky, even, but Heart of a Dog sparkles with its creator's wisdom and droll philosophical insight.
  24. Director and co-writer Tom McCarthy played a weasel of a journalist in "The Wire." Now he has made a meticulous, exacting procedural on real-life journalists who excelled at their job; had the resources to do it properly; and in early 2002, published the first in a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of grim, carefully detailed stories of pedophile priests.
  25. It's one of the most satisfying films of 2015.
  26. What these men endured is remarkable, and the logistics of the rescue are remarkable as well. The 33 settles for an unremarkable chronicle of that endurance test.
  27. While it's a cliche to praise a performance requiring some harsh, fairly explicit on-screen behavior and interactions, Silverman's doing the opposite of grandstanding here.
  28. For all its workmanlike devotion to out-of-control helicopters, “Spectre” works best when everyone’s on the ground, doing his or her job, driving expensive fast cars heedlessly, detonating the occasional wisecrack, enjoying themselves and their beautiful clothes.
  29. Jane is a genius, but she's deeply flawed and complicated, struggling with substance abuse, mental illness, her own past regrets. That dark underbelly adds depth and dimension to the ironic humor of Our Brand is Crisis.
  30. From its initial first-person, behind-the-wheel viewpoint to its final implication of all-pervasive surveillance, Panahi creates a fascinating hybrid that becomes a microcosm of Tehran.

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